Hospitality social media in the UK: the 2026 report for hotels and restaurants

UK hospitality entered 2026 spending more on social content than in any year before it, and a growing share of the decision to book a room or a table now starts on a feed rather than a search engine.

This is the picture for a sector contributing around 93 billion pounds a year and employing more than 3.5 million people.4 What is working, which platforms matter, and where the next wave of discovery fits in.

From OTA shelves to social search

For two decades the route to a UK hotel booking ran through an online travel agency. That is shifting. Mordor Intelligence values the UK hospitality market at 63.8 billion dollars in 2026, rising to 78.28 billion by 2031.3 Online travel agencies still command 37.24 per cent of bookings, but direct digital is the fastest growing segment at 7.34 per cent a year.3 The practical takeaway is simple: the audience you build on Instagram or TikTok is the audience you do not have to rent back at commission.

This matters most to small operators, and UK hospitality is overwhelmingly small. Around 176,000 businesses, 99.6 per cent of them SMEs,5 with independent hotels alone holding 57.28 per cent of the market.3 For an independent without a national ad budget, an owned audience is often the only discovery channel that does not charge per click.

The platform picture

The KAM and Kitch State of Social 2026 report surveyed 68 brands across more than 1,900 sites.1 Every contributing brand is on Instagram at a median 30,132 followers. TikTok adoption sits at 71 per cent, and committed brands see a median 114,500 views. Facebook remains widespread at 85 per cent, down from 97 per cent, but 81 per cent of its interactions now come from paid.2

A specific discipline rather than a generic marketing add on, and defining it precisely is the first step to briefing it well.

It does two jobs at once: making a property look worth choosing, and giving the algorithm enough reason to show it to people who have never heard of it. With every UK brand now on Instagram and 71 per cent on TikTok, the baseline is no longer being present, it is whether the content earns reach.1

What it includes, and what it does not

That last exclusion matters and most agencies blur it. We film social content: vertical video, a long form property film and social stills shot on the same visit. A property that needs architectural interiors lit for a brochure should commission a photographer, and we will say so. The distinction is set out on the hospitality content creator page.

The three layers of a hospitality account

Every strong presence works on three layers at once, and a brief naming all three is far easier to deliver against than one asking only for nice photos.

• 01Brand

  The aspirational layer: the rooms, the plates and the views that make somebody want to be there. What most people picture when they think of hotel content.

• 02Performance

  The reach layer: short form built to be discovered, plus paid amplification, because 81 per cent of Facebook interactions now come from paid.

• 03Community

  The retention layer: replies, reposts and the daily relationship that turns a one time visitor into a returning, recommending guest.

The three layers are also the honest way to decide who does the work. Brand and performance are production questions, answered by a visit that produces a library. Community is a management question, answered by somebody being there every day. Most properties need both, which is why hospitality social media management and on location production are sold as two different things rather than bundled into one vague retainer.

If you take one framework from this report, take this one. The question we are asked most is simply what to post. Build every month from five pillars and rotate, so the feed stays varied without running dry.

• 01Property and venue showcase

  The aspirational core: the spaces a guest is actually paying for, shot to make the choice feel obvious. The pillar that most directly supports a direct booking over an OTA listing. Room and suite reveals, common areas, the exterior at golden hour, the seasonal redress.

• 02Food and beverage

  The most shareable pillar in hospitality. Food and drink travels further than almost anything else a venue posts, and it works for hotels and restaurants alike. Signature dishes and plating, bar service and pours, chef and kitchen stories, ingredient sourcing.

• 03Guest experience and storytelling

  The pillar that sells the stay rather than the room. It narrates what a visit actually feels like, which is what turns a scroll into a saved post and a saved post into a booking. A day in the life, sample itineraries, local recommendations, seasonal reasons to visit.

• 04Behind the scenes

  The trust pillar. Showing the people and the care behind a stay builds credibility that polished brand shots cannot, and it gives a feed the steady volume an ongoing account needs. Staff moments, sustainability in practice, design and renovation choices.

• 05Content from real guests

  The proof pillar. Guest content carries social proof that brand made content cannot buy, and resharing it is the cheapest high trust format a venue has. Reposted guest Reels, tagged stays, reviews turned into content, creator visits. Always with consent and a clear tag.

Each pillar has a home elsewhere on this site if you would rather see it than read about it. Property and guest experience run through the hotel content packages, food and beverage through the restaurant content packages, and the behind the scenes and guest content pillars are scheduling problems more than filming ones, which is what a social media management UK plan exists to solve.

The part to bookmark. Benchmarks a UK hotel or restaurant can measure itself against, from neutral sources, followed by what those numbers look like on a live portfolio we run. Every figure names its source.

What is a good engagement rate for a UK hotel or restaurant?

The median daily engagement rate for UK hospitality is around 0.2 per cent on Instagram, 2.3 per cent on TikTok and 0.4 per cent on Facebook. This is where most operators first misjudge themselves, because the realistic bar is lower than people expect. Instagram sits below the 0.4 per cent all industry average, TikTok sits just under 2.6 per cent, and Facebook sits above its 0.1 per cent average only because the benchmark is explicit that the figure is almost entirely paid rather than organic.6

Source: KAM and Kitch, State of Social 2026, medians across 68 UK hospitality brands.

How often should a hotel or restaurant post?

The sector norm is steadier than most assume. UK hospitality brands post a median of four Instagram posts or Reels a week, two TikToks and four Facebook posts.6 Format matters more than raw volume. Reels generate 44 per cent of Instagram interactions from only 19 per cent of views, while standard posts deliver 62 per cent of views and 44 per cent of interactions, so a healthy feed needs both reach formats and engagement formats.6 Hootsuite finds carousels the strongest Instagram format for dining and tourism at 3.7 per cent.7 On Facebook, paid drives 92 per cent of views and 81 per cent of interactions.2

The measurement gap, and why it is not the argument

The honest answer to what a booking from social costs is that most of the sector cannot yet say. Only 56 per cent of hospitality brands can track bookings or conversions directly from paid activity.6 What is measurable is the channel economics underneath. OTAs take 37.24 per cent of bookings while direct digital grows 7.34 per cent a year, so every booking earned through an owned audience is one not surrendered to commission.3 That is the real cost case, and it does not depend on a single attributed figure.

Why most brands outsource part of it

The benchmark also explains who does this work. The average UK hospitality social team is 1.3 people, and 87 per cent of brands use an agency or freelancer for at least one element.6 Limited time and resource was the single most cited challenge in the survey.6 A team of one and a third people cannot film, edit, schedule, caption and answer comments across three platforms and also cover the day job, which is the real reason the outsourcing figure is that high.

The same playbook on live accounts

Benchmarks describe the field. The table below is real results from the Snaptrip Group travel portfolio, whose organic social we have run since September 2025. Growth is against the prior period for the named accounts, reported as growth and engagement only.8

Source: Velena Lifestyle, Snaptrip Group portfolio reporting. Growth against the prior period since the September 2025 handover. Organic only. No paid campaign or revenue data included.

What the benchmark does not tell you

Three limits are worth stating before anyone plans a year around these numbers. The benchmark is a median, so half the sector sits below every figure in it and a venue at 0.15 per cent on Instagram is not failing, it is ordinary. It counts brands rather than sites, so a group of forty pubs and a single country house appear as one data point each. And it measures engagement rather than revenue, which is exactly the gap the sector cannot yet close, because only just over half of brands can attribute a booking to paid activity at all.

What follows from that is a working rule. Use the medians to decide whether your account is healthy, and use your own booking data to decide whether it is working. They are different questions and one number cannot answer both.

The metrics that actually predict a booking

Likes are the weakest signal in hospitality and the one most venues still report. The three that move with bookings are saves, shares and direct messages, because each of them is a person doing something that costs them effort. A save is a shortlist. A share is a recommendation to somebody who was not looking. A message is an enquiry with the friction already removed.

None of these is in the KAM and Kitch benchmark, because the benchmark reports what brands publish rather than what they should watch. That is a gap rather than a criticism, and it is the reason the reporting we send retainer clients leads on saves, shares and messages instead of on reach.

A reporting sheet you can actually keep

The most common failure in hospitality reporting is that it is too elaborate to survive a busy month. Seven rows, once a month, is the version that lasts. Posts out, views, engagement rate, saves, shares, messages, and profile link clicks. Seven numbers, one row per month, twelve rows a year, and after four months you can see a trend rather than a snapshot. Anything more detailed than that gets abandoned by March in every venue we have worked with.

Creator style content is now the dominant creative approach in UK hospitality, used by more brands than professional photography or videography, because it reads as real rather than staged.6

What it actually looks like

A short, on property creator video, usually 30 to 60 seconds, filmed vertically in the rooms, the restaurant or the grounds. Not licensed stock and not a glossy brand film. The point is the first person feel of a real stay, which is exactly the texture the benchmark data rewards. Professional photography still has its place and is used by 85 per cent of brands, but its share has fallen as authentic content has risen.6

Hotel content against restaurant content

The two differ in rhythm. Hotel content is a slower aspirational arc: arrival, room reveal, spa, view, the feeling of a stay across a day. Restaurant content is faster and tighter: the dish, the pour, the pass, the first bite, built to land in three seconds. Both belong on the property, food and guest experience pillars from Part 3, and both work hardest filmed by somebody who knows how hospitality reads on camera.

The format most properties have never commissioned

Not every showcase is a short. One of the most trust building formats is the property shown naturally inside a longer travel film, around a real moment: settling into the room, heading down to breakfast, taking in the view. Because it sits inside a genuine stay rather than a standalone advert it reads as a review, which is exactly the first hand experience guests and increasingly AI search reward. It is also the format at the centre of every hotel package on this site.

Every deliverable, and what each one is actually for

Content visits produce five different things and they are not interchangeable. A venue that commissions only Reels has no website hero. A venue that commissions only photography has nothing to post. The list below is what comes out of a hospitality visit and what each piece is genuinely used for, which is the part most briefs leave out.

• The long form property filmTen to thirty minutes, cut as a real stay rather than an advert. Its job is the website, YouTube and the sales conversation, not the feed. It is the piece a corporate booker or a wedding enquiry watches all the way through, and the piece an OTA listing can never carry.
• Vertical ReelsThirty to sixty seconds, 9:16, built for discovery. Their job is reach: getting the property in front of people who have never heard of it. Every Reel should survive being watched on mute by someone who does not know where they are.
• Social stillsFeed and Stories images, formatted for social rather than print. Their job is the grid, the offer post and the carousel. Not a substitute for architectural photography and not sold as one.
• The B roll packThe raw usable footage, handed over rather than kept. Its job is everything you have not thought of yet: the ad you run in March, the Christmas cut, the recruitment post, the piece your own team wants to make. It is the deliverable clients undervalue at the point of sale and thank us for later.
• Captions and a Stories packThe writing and the sequencing, so the footage arrives usable rather than as a folder somebody has to plan around. On the retainer tiers this is the difference between content existing and content being published.

Ratios, and why three of them matter

Every Reel is delivered in 9:16, 4:5 and 1:1 because those three ratios are three different jobs. 9:16 is the feed and TikTok, where reach happens. 4:5 is the in feed post on Instagram, which occupies more vertical space than a square and stops the scroll for longer. 1:1 is the safe ratio for anything that will be cropped by a platform you do not control, including some ad placements and most third party listing sites. Delivering one ratio and letting the platform crop the rest is how a chef's face ends up half out of frame in a paid placement.

What a shoot cannot fix

Two honest limits, because they decide whether a visit is worth booking. Content cannot fix a property mid renovation, and filming around scaffolding produces footage nobody will publish. And content cannot fix a review problem: a venue averaging 3.6 out of 5 does not have a content problem, it has an operations problem that content will amplify rather than solve. In both cases the right advice is to wait, and we give it.

Buy once, use everywhere

One content visit is not a single post. It is a library you can cut, repurpose and run for months across every channel a guest touches before they book. The biggest cost in any shoot is getting creators on site in the first place, so the more you commission in one visit, the lower the cost of each usable asset.

One condition makes all of this work: your agreement should give you ownership of the deliverables and, for anything used in paid ads, explicit paid usage rights for the term and territory you need. Part 14 covers the rights detail in full.

Each platform rewards a different rhythm, so a single feed cross posted everywhere underperforms on all of them. Cadence here is drawn from both the sector benchmark and the live Snaptrip accounts, where the flagship posts three to four times a week per platform and the smaller brands hold a sustainable two.8

The cadence that works, platform by platform

The common thread is consistency over intensity. A property posting to a steady, platform appropriate cadence will out perform one that posts in bursts and goes quiet, which is exactly the pattern behind the Snaptrip growth in Part 4.

Captions, audio and hashtags, the three things briefs never specify

The video gets the attention and the three details around it decide how far it travels. All three are cheap to get right and expensive to get wrong.

YouTube, the platform hospitality forgets

It sits outside the four playbooks above because it is not a feed, and treating it as one is why most venues abandon it. YouTube is a search engine and an archive, which makes it the natural home for the long form property film that has nowhere else to live. A film sitting on YouTube keeps being found by people typing the name of a town and the word hotel, months and years after it was published, in a way no Reel does.

The practical version is small. One property film per season, titled as a search would phrase it rather than as a brand would, described properly with the location and the room types named, and embedded on your own site so it works twice. Shorts are optional and are simply your existing Reels reposted. That is the entire commitment, and it is roughly an hour a season.

How the four platforms feed each other

The mistake is running them as four accounts. They are one library published four ways. A single visit produces the film for YouTube and the site, the vertical cuts for Instagram and TikTok, the stills for the feed and Pinterest, and the B roll for whatever gets boosted on Facebook. The cadence differs per platform, the content does not, and a venue that understands that spends once and publishes for a month.

The pillars and the playbooks are the frame. What goes inside them should change completely depending on what your venue actually sells. A five star country house sells a feeling. A city budget hotel sells ease, location and value. Their content should look and sound nothing alike.

Two venue types the tables above do not cover

Pubs with rooms and dedicated wedding and events venues both sell something the hotel and restaurant frames miss, and both are common enough in the UK to deserve their own line.

Multi property groups, and the account structure question

Groups ask one question above all others: one account or one per property. The answer depends on whether the guest is choosing the brand or the place. If somebody books you because of where it is, each property needs its own account, because the location is the product and a single account cannot rank in local social search for six towns at once. If they book you because of who you are, a single brand account is stronger and each property becomes a highlight and a location tag inside it.

The Snaptrip Group portfolio in Part 4 is the first pattern: seven brands, eleven accounts, each with its own audience and its own voice, run centrally. That works because the brands genuinely serve different audiences. Running eleven accounts for eleven near identical properties would be eleven times the work for one audience, and it is the most common structural mistake we are asked to unpick.

Trends worth following in 2026

Only where they fit your venue and your voice. These are the shifts actually shaping UK hospitality social this year.

• Social has become a search engineGuests search inside TikTok and Instagram for hotels in a named region or the best brunch in a named city. Write keyword led captions and on screen text naming the location, the dish and the offer.
• Personality over perfectionRaw, phone shot content with named faces now out performs glossy brand films. Put real people on camera.
• Nano and community creatorsLocal creators with 1,000 to 10,000 followers drive more genuine bookings than big names, at a fraction of the cost.
• LinkedIn for city and business hotelsFor properties chasing corporate and events trade it has become a real channel, with a named person posting human content rather than corporate announcements.
• Long form returns alongside shortLonger films are coming back as a way to tell a fuller story beside the short form feed. Cut one hero piece per season from the same visit.
• Revenue focused measurementBrands are judging content by saves, shares and bookings rather than likes, especially as only just over half can track bookings from paid.6

Good hospitality content is not luck, it is a repeatable cycle. Here is how the work actually gets done each month, and the honest trade off between running it in house and bringing somebody in.

1. BriefAgree goals, active pillars, platforms and the month priorities, so every piece has a job.
2. ConceptTurn the brief into specific post and video ideas mapped to the five pillars.
3. ShootCapture on property video and social stills, the creator led footage that reads as real rather than staged.
4. EditCut to platform, add captions and native audio, and version each piece for Reels, TikTok and Stories.

1. SchedulePublish at the right cadence per platform and manage community replies as they come in.
2. MeasureReport on reach, engagement and growth, then feed the learning straight back into the next brief.
3. RefreshRetire the formats that stopped working and recut the B roll rather than booking another shoot.
4. RepeatThe cycle is monthly. The compounding is what produced the numbers in Part 4.

The benchmark is blunt about the reality, with the average hospitality social team at 1.3 people and 87 per cent of brands already using an agency or freelancer for at least one element.6 The cycle above is the one we run for every retainer client, from brief to monthly report.

How working with us actually starts

This answers the question everybody asks after deciding they want help: what happens next. There is no discovery call gauntlet and no proposal you wait a week for.

New for 2026, because the question we are asked most after what to post is when to post it. UK hospitality demand is seasonal, booking windows are seasonal, and content that arrives in the same month as the demand has already missed it.

The rule that governs the whole calendar is simple: film one season ahead, publish six to eight weeks ahead of the booking window. A Christmas campaign shot in December is a record of last year. A Christmas campaign shot in October is inventory.

Windows are drawn from our own scheduling across the Snaptrip Group portfolio and our hospitality shoots, not from a published source. Treat them as a working calendar rather than a statistic.

The dates that actually move UK hospitality demand

The windows above are the rhythm. These are the fixed points inside them, and the lead time each one needs before the content has to be live. Lead time is the number that matters, because it is the one every venue underestimates.

Lead times are our own scheduling practice across hospitality and travel accounts, not a published source. A venue with an unusually long or short booking window should adjust them rather than adopt them.

Why the festive window is the one worth getting right

Christmas party enquiries for most UK venues open in September and are largely settled by early November, which means the content has to exist in August. That is the single hardest ask in the calendar, because August is the busiest month of the year in most venues and the last one anyone wants to film in. It is also why the festive campaign is the most common thing a venue is late on, every year, and the reason our Seasonal Campaign package exists as a three night visit rather than a one night one.

The workaround, if a shoot in August is impossible, is to film the festive dressing in the last week of the previous December and hold it for eleven months. The room does not change and nobody watching can tell. Most venues have never considered it and it is the cheapest fix in this report.

The off season is not a gap, it is the planning season

February and November feel like the wrong time to post because the venue is quiet. They are the right time, because a quiet venue is a venue whose guests are at home planning the next trip. Cutting the feed in the off season is the most common seasonal mistake we see and it costs the following season rather than the current one: an account that goes silent for six weeks loses distribution that takes about the same again to rebuild.

Everything up to here has been about what you publish. This part is about what happens underneath it, which in hospitality matters more than in any other sector we work in, because the replies are public and the reviews are permanent.

Why hospitality is different

In most sectors an unanswered comment is a missed opportunity. In hospitality it is a booking question left overnight, a complaint compounding in public, or a guest who tagged you and got nothing back. The asymmetry is the point: a good reply is seen by a handful of people, and a missing one is seen by everybody who checks the account before booking. That is why community management sits in the management plans rather than in the content packages, and why the two are priced separately.

What good looks like, in four rules

• Answer inside the hour during serviceA message asking whether you have a table tonight is worthless tomorrow. Outside service, the same day is fine. Set the expectation in your bio rather than leaving people guessing.
• Reply to every review, including the good onesThe best reviews are where you get to say what you are actually proud of, in public, without it sounding like marketing. Most venues only reply to complaints, which makes the reply feed read like a complaints log.
• Reply to a complaint once, properly, and then move it off the platformAcknowledge specifically, take responsibility for the part that is yours, and offer a direct route. Never argue, never explain the operational reason at length, and never reply twice in public.
• Repost guest content with a thank you and a tagIt costs nothing, it is the highest trust content on the account, and it makes the next guest more likely to tag you. Always with permission.

The review reply that works, in three lines

Every effective response to a negative review has the same shape and it can be written in under a minute. Line one names the specific thing that went wrong, in their words rather than yours, so it is obvious the review was read. Line two takes responsibility for the part that is genuinely yours, with no explanation attached, because an explanation reads as a defence to everyone except the person writing it. Line three offers a direct route, by name, to a real person.

What breaks it is the fourth line. The moment a reply starts explaining that it was an unusually busy night, or that the guest did not raise it at the time, the audience stops reading a business taking responsibility and starts reading an argument. Nobody has ever been persuaded by the fourth line.

How much time this actually takes

Less than venues fear and more than they budget. Ten to fifteen minutes a day covers comments and messages for a single site account, and it does more for reach than an extra post, because platforms read early engagement as a quality signal and a reply from the account counts. What breaks it is that the ten minutes has no owner: it falls to whoever has their phone, which means evenings and weekends get missed, which is exactly when a hospitality account is busiest. Naming one person, with a second for their days off, is the whole solution and it costs nothing.

Across the plans that layer sits at the top of the range for that reason. Monitoring with issues flagged to you is one job; full community management six or seven days a week is a different one, and pretending otherwise is how agencies end up quietly not doing it.

Organic is where this report has spent most of its attention, because organic is what compounds. But with 81 per cent of Facebook interactions now coming from paid,2 a hospitality account that refuses paid entirely is choosing to give up one platform completely.

The rule that decides everything else

Never make content for ads. Make content, find out which of it works, and put money behind that. The single most reliable way to waste a hospitality ad budget is to brief a piece of creative specifically as an advert, because it will look like one, and hospitality creative that looks like an advert underperforms creative that looks like a stay. Everything in the B roll pack from Part 5 exists to be recut for this, which is why we hand it over.

What to put money behind, in order

• Your best organic Reel, at least a week oldSomething that has already beaten your own average. It has passed the only test that matters, on your own audience, for free.
• Retargeting people who watched itCheaper than any cold audience and warmer than any list. Somebody who watched 75 per cent of a room tour is closer to booking than most of your followers.
• Past guestsThe highest returning audience in hospitality and the most neglected. Upload the list, exclude anyone with a booking in the next 90 days, and speak to them as returners rather than as strangers.
• A tight geography, for anything localRestaurants, bars and pubs rarely need more than a 10 to 15 mile radius. Hotels need the feeder cities rather than the county.
• Cold interest audiences, lastThe most expensive and the least accountable. Worth testing once the three above are running, and worth turning off first.

Boosting against campaigns, stated plainly

The boost button optimises for cheap engagement, because that is what it is for. It is a reasonable tool for one job: putting reach behind a post that is already working, to build audience. It is the wrong tool for bookings, because it cannot optimise towards your booking engine and cannot be measured against a reservation. If the goal is revenue, the campaign is built in the ads manager, the objective is traffic or conversions, and the destination is the booking page rather than the profile.

The benchmark to judge it against

Not an industry cost per click, which varies too much by region and season to be useful. Judge it against the thing you already pay: OTA commission. If a booking through paid social costs less than the roughly 36 pounds a night that a 20 per cent commission takes on a 180 pound room, the campaign is cheaper than the channel you are already using. If it costs more, it is not, and the money belongs back in organic and in the content library. That is a comparison every operator can make from numbers they already have, and it does not require a single industry benchmark.

Two case studies, treated as proof rather than promotion. Numbers first, then the approach that produced them.

Two different questions get confused here. What the production market charges, and what an ongoing plan costs. This part answers both, and puts our own numbers in the same table so you can judge them against the market rather than against nothing.

What the production market charges

Source: 2026 UK production rate guides. These are market figures for context and are not our prices.

Two things follow from that table. A long form property film alone, at one to three shoot days plus three to six edit days, benchmarks well above what a whole package costs. And a hotel photographer at 650 a day is doing a different job from us, which is why we say plainly that a property needing architectural interiors should hire one.

What we charge, and what each figure covers

These render live from the shop, so the number on this page is the number at checkout. The full comparison, the deliverable lists and the buying decision live on the package pages rather than here, because this is a report rather than a shop window.

Turnaround on the one off hotel packages is 10 working days, and 5 to 7 working days on the retainer. Licence: Organic use on your own channels plus paid media rights for 12 months from delivery. Retainers are Rolling monthly, 2 months notice, no setup fees. Full deliverable lists on the hotel content packages and restaurant content packages pages, and the whole range sits on the hospitality content creator hub.

What is inside each package, in full

The deliverable lists live on the package pages, and they are repeated here because a report that states a price without stating what it buys is not much use as a reference. What follows is informational: the buying decision, the tier comparison and the order button stay where they belong.

How to decide which one, without talking to anyone

Three questions settle it in most cases. Do you need a film, or only feed content? A film means a hotel package or a Content Day; feed content alone means Menu Spotlight or a retainer. Is this a launch, a season or an ongoing problem? A launch or a season is a one off package; an ongoing problem is a retainer, because the failure mode is a quiet feed rather than a missing asset. And will the content be used in paid ads? If yes, you need a tier that carries a 12 month paid media licence, because the entry tiers are Organic only. No paid media rights at this tier.

The most common mistake, and the one we talk properties out of most often, is buying the top tier for a first project. A three night seasonal campaign is the right answer for a venue that already knows what its content does. For a venue finding out, the entry tier and an honest review afterwards is worth more and costs less.

What drives the price, since none of it is arbitrary

Four things, in order of weight. Days on site, because two people travelling and staying is the largest fixed cost in any visit. Edit load, because a twenty minute film is not twice the work of a ten minute one. The licence, because organic only and twelve month paid rights are genuinely different products. And volume, because the marginal cost of the seventh cut from footage already shot is a fraction of the first. That last one is why the Reel counts look generous next to any per video rate in the market table above, and it is the whole economic argument for commissioning in one visit rather than four.

The comparison a hotel should actually make

Not against a photographer, and not against a creator rate. Against commission. UK OTA commission runs 15 to 25 per cent depending on platform and tier, while a direct booking costs roughly 4.5 per cent all in. On a 180 pound room that is about 36 pounds lost per night against 8, a difference of nearly 28 pounds every time a booking moves from an OTA to your own site. Which turns every price above into a number you already track.

Calculated from the live prices above at a 180 pound average rate and 20 per cent commission, the midpoint of the published range, against a 4.5 per cent direct cost. A twenty room property at seventy per cent occupancy sells roughly 420 room nights a month, so the entry package is worth about four days of commission to that property. Illustrative arithmetic rather than a promise about results.

Restaurants should run the same sum with covers rather than commission. Take your average spend per head, divide the package price by it, and you have the number of covers the content has to influence across its twelve month licence before it has paid for itself. Most operators find the number smaller than they expected, which is the honest reason the arithmetic is worth doing rather than the marketing reason.

The film is the product, and it is not on this page

Every hotel package is built around a property film that goes to the client rather than being published, because publishing it would compete with the property it was made for. Ask and we will send you a full one to watch, where the client is happy for us to share it. That tells you more than any showreel.

Most agency content skips this, which is exactly why it is worth covering. Getting rights and disclosure right protects a venue from muted videos, removed posts and regulator attention.

Guest imagery and data, the part that is law rather than guidance

Filming in a venue means filming people who did not come to be filmed. UK data protection law treats identifiable images of people as personal data, which is a stronger position than most venues assume, and consent is the practical answer rather than the legal minimum. What that looks like in practice on a shoot is simple and we do it on every visit: signage at the entrance on filming days, staff briefed in advance rather than on the day, no filming in bedrooms, spas or bathrooms while occupied, and a face that ends up in frame incidentally gets blurred or the shot gets cut.

Staff are the case venues most often get wrong. An employee is not in a position to refuse freely in front of a manager, which means consent has to be sought in advance, in writing, with a genuine option to decline and no consequence for it. It also has to survive them leaving: if a chef who features in your best performing Reel resigns, they can ask for it to come down, and the answer is that it comes down.

Food, drink and the claims you cannot make

Accessibility, which is reach as well as duty

Burned in captions on every video, meaningful alt text on every image, and enough colour contrast in on screen text to be readable on a phone in daylight. The duty argument is the right one, and the commercial argument is that most social video is watched on mute, so a video without captions is a video most people cannot follow. Venues that add captions usually see retention improve, which is the rare case where the compliant version is also the better performing one.

What to have in writing before a creator sets foot on site

• Deliverables and quantitiesExact counts and exact formats, not approximately. This is where disputes start.
• Usage, term and territoryOrganic only, or paid rights, for how long, and where. All three, not one.
• Ownership of raw footageWhether you get the B roll at all. Many agreements quietly say no.
• DisclosureWho labels what, and how, if anything is gifted or paid.
• TakedownWhat happens if a guest or a member of staff later asks to be removed.
• ApprovalWhether you see and sign off the shot list, and when.

None of that is unusual and none of it is expensive to agree. All of it is expensive to sort out afterwards.

Two regulators sit behind the UK disclosure rules. The Advertising Standards Authority publishes the influencer disclosure guidance and handles complaints, while the Competition and Markets Authority can take legal action under consumer protection law. For music, both major platforms restrict business accounts to their licensed libraries.

A content partner who handles all of this is doing part of the job that protects the brand, not just decorating the feed. Every package states its licence term on the page: Organic use on your own channels plus paid media rights for 12 months from delivery.

Useful even if you never hire us, because a clear brief gets a better result from anyone.

What a good brief looks like written out

The eight elements above are the checklist. This is what they look like as an actual brief, at the length it should be, because the most common problem is not a bad brief but a two line one.

That takes twenty minutes to write and it changes the output more than any amount of money does. It also does something less obvious: it tells you whether the agency understood you, because a good one will push back on at least one line of it. In the example above, the honest push back is that four Instagram posts a week for three months is more content than two nights on site will produce well, and the choice is either fewer posts or a second visit.

The questions worth asking that most people do not

• Who is on site, by name, and are they the people I have been talking toThe single most useful question in this list. In a lot of agencies the answer is no and nobody asks.
• What happens if the weather is wrongAn outdoor led shoot with no wet weather plan is a shoot you may be paying for twice.
• Do I get the raw footageOften the answer is no, and it is worth more than an extra Reel.
• What does the second month look likeAnyone can deliver a first month. Ask what happens when the initial library runs out.
• What would you tell me not to buyAn agency that cannot name something in its own range that you do not need is selling rather than advising.

Red flags, stated plainly

Three things should give you pause when choosing anyone. A creator pool where you never know who is turning up at your property. No published portfolio you can watch without a sales call. And a proposal that will not separate production from management, because bundling them hides which half you are actually paying for and makes it impossible to stop one without stopping both.

What to ask before you sign

Four questions separate a partner from a supplier. Who actually turns up and films, by name. Who owns the finished content and for how long. What the notice period is. And can you watch comparable work before you commit, rather than a showreel of somebody else's.

The longevity test is the one most people forget to apply. A three year retainer still running and an eleven month partnership with a global app company are the proof points a new agency cannot fake, and they are worth more than any list of logos.

A new discovery layer sits above everything else. AI Overviews appear above the map pack, a large share of searches now end without a click, and more guests ask an assistant for the best boutique hotel in a region and act on the names that come back. The job in 2026 is to be the venue the answer names.

What is EEAT, and why does it decide this?

EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust. It is Google's content quality framework, and it is also what makes a model confident enough to name you rather than a competitor. Experience means first hand content, your own video of the actual rooms and plates, with a human point of view rather than stock. Expertise means real named people, your chef or general manager, with a short bio. Authoritativeness means credible sources vouch for you: genuine reviews, local press, roundups. Trust means everything is accurate and verifiable, from the address to the prices.

Google AI Overviews and the local pack

• Own your Google Business Profile and keep it freshComplete every field, choose precise categories, add attributes like dog friendly or parking, upload photos weekly and post regularly. Freshness is a signal in itself.
• Get reviews and reply to themVolume, recency and your replies all count, and the model reads them.
• Add the right schemaLocalBusiness plus Hotel or Restaurant, with address, hours, price range and for restaurants a menu.
• Answer the real questions on your siteBuild pages and FAQs around what guests actually type, answered clearly near the top.
• Link your social accountsKeep the name, logo and details identical across all of them.

How do I get my hotel cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini?

Generative engines choose sources differently from Google, and the research that named the field found that fact density, real statistics, citations and quotations lift how often a page is cited, while keyword stuffing does nothing. Five practical moves follow from that.

• Lead with the answerPut a clear, quotable answer in the first lines, then support it.
• Be specificReal numbers, distances, prices, dates, room counts and awards make a page citable. Vague marketing copy does not get quoted.
• Mirror the answer shapeSearch your target question in an assistant, see the format it returns, then publish a cleaner and more thorough version.
• Make sure the engines can reach youSubmit your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools as well as Google, which most venues never do, and allow the AI crawlers in robots.txt rather than blocking them.
• Earn off site mentionsModels trust what the wider web says about you, so local press, tourism sites and genuine roundups are what get you into answers.

The technical setup, in the order it should be done

Most of this section is editorial. This subsection is not, and it is the part a venue can hand to whoever manages the website. Four things, in order, none of which take long.

• Structured dataLocalBusiness plus the specific type, Hotel or Restaurant, carrying the address, telephone, opening hours, price range, and for a restaurant the menu URL and cuisine. For a hotel, add the room types and amenities. This is the single highest value technical change available to most venues and it is usually missing entirely.
• Crawler accessCheck robots.txt actually allows the AI crawlers rather than blocking them by default, which some security plugins do silently. Blocking them is a decision worth taking deliberately if you take it at all, and almost no venue has taken it deliberately.
• Bing Webmaster ToolsSubmit the sitemap there as well as to Google Search Console. It takes ten minutes and it is skipped by nearly every independent venue, which matters because several assistants read the web through Bing rather than Google.
• Consistent entity detailsThe exact same business name, address, phone and opening hours on the website, the Google Business Profile, every directory and every social bio. Not roughly the same. Character for character, because the inconsistency is what makes a model hedge.

How to tell whether any of it is working

The honest answer is that AI referral measurement is immature and anyone selling certainty about it is overselling. Three things are measurable today and they are worth watching monthly rather than obsessing over.

The uncomfortable part

Being cited by an assistant will often not send you a visitor. The answer names you, the person books, and nothing in your analytics connects those two events. That is genuinely difficult to justify to a board, and pretending otherwise is why a lot of AI visibility advice sounds like faith. The defensible framing is the same one that applies to the map pack and to word of mouth: it is a discovery channel that occasionally reports itself. The work behind it, first hand content, named people, accurate details and credible mentions, is worth doing on its own terms, because every one of those things also serves guests who arrive through a channel you can measure.

Stay consistent across the open web

The models build their picture of you from everywhere your name appears. If your address, phone or key facts differ between your website, your Google profile, directories and your social accounts, the model is less confident and less likely to name you. Say the same thing everywhere.

This report is built to its own advice: primary source data, named authors, schema, clear answers and a structure designed to be quoted. It is the same approach we build into the content we run for hospitality clients, and the same one behind our own case studies.

Methodology, sources and the authors

Last updated 17 August 2026

Frequently asked questions

Glossary

Plain definitions for the terms this report uses, because half of them mean different things to an agency and to an operator.

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